How a large program would work in an agile and non agile way (i.e. waterfall) using JIRA?

[Maria Victoria Martinez Torino]

Hi,

I need to give a demo of JIRA server on a server hosted by our company.

The thing is that we would like to know in advance how a large program would work in an agile and non agile way (for instance using waterfall) using JIRA? Does JIRA support hybrid ways of working? How is best way to achieve this leveraging the Out-of-The-Box project configuration?

We are using JIRA v6.4.12 and JIRA Agile v6.7.11.

Look forward to your feedback.

Thanks,

Victoria.

[Phill Fox]

JIRA is configurable in such a way that it will support the purist Waterfall or Agile approaches, but in reality most organisations use a hybrid of Waterfall and Agile. 

JIRA as of V7 comes with a number of useful project templates that will provide you with out of the box configurations that match different methodologies. Do not be scared of changing these to meet your specific organisations particular requirements as that is part of the strength of JIRA.

You might to look at the site www.atlassian.com/agile for a more indepth approach to how Agile in JIRA works. 

[Maria Victoria Martinez Torino]

That's good but we are not planning to upgrade to V7 in the near future.

So we have to follow the best approach using the current version of the tool we have installed.

[Phill Fox]

Many of the principles are unchanged and indeed V7 really just automates a lot of what can already be done in the earlier version. 

[Maria Victoria Martinez Torino]

Our preference would be as little configuration as possible....maybe another option could be to have one project instance based on Scrum configuration and another instance based on a more traditional configuration (maybe by selecting the "Project Management" configuration?).

So, a project would have two project instances setup in the JIRA server...one supporting Agile and the other one supporting Waterfall...That way, a project team would use one or another project instance, depending on the nature of the work to be performed without having to customize the tool...

Any other suggestions or experiences in hybrid project teams are very welcome.

[Phill Fox]

I would try not to split the project in two as it will make reporting on a single client more complex. You can always base a Scrum (or Kanban) board off a filter rather than a whole project and that then means you retain the full project context but can work on whichever parts you need to in an Agile approach. The spilt could be on issuetype or even a customfield to determine which methodology is in place.